Dave Sussman of Whiskey Politics interviewed George Gilder recently, and that interview is the latest Whiskey Politics podcast here. I was eager to listen, both because Dave is a terrific interviewer and Gilder a fascinating visionary, and also because I’d read Gilder’s latest book, Life After Google, and found it unsatisfying. I hoped that Gilder would offer something that I missed in his book, and that would make sense of what I thought was a rambling and unconvincing work.
If anything, my opinion of Life After Google is lower now than it was prior to this interview. Far from supporting his various and vague assertions, I think Gilder has doubled down on what increasingly seems, to me, to be nonsense.
Gilder undoubtedly knows all sorts of things I don’t know; he lives his life in communion with deep thinkers and profoundly successful entrepreneurs, futurists, and inventors. He is not a trivial man, which leaves me wondering why this latest work is, in my opinion, a trivial book. I will be watching closely as his next book comes out, to see if he’s again hit his stride.
It has been observed that one can read an article in a newspaper on a topic with which one is familiar and scoff at the ignorance of the author, and then turn the page and read an article on a topic of which one knows little and comfortably assume that that author knows his stuff. I know math and computing pretty well. I don’t know fractional reserve banking or foreign trade or monetary theory or corporate finance, but math and computing, that I’ve got.
Let’s start with a quick note about the zettabyte, a quantity which Gilder says “preoccupies me these days.” Gilder claims (about 12:30) that the zettabyte is “about as big as it gets, two to the three hundredth, it’s more than all the atoms in the universe.” Gilder then goes on to claim that it approximates all of the data currently connected to the internet.
That should throw a flag, as it did with me, in that it suggests that we are somehow storing vast quantities of data per atom; otherwise, it would be impossible to have more data connected to the internet than there are atoms in the universe. So obviously Gilder misspoke, either about the size of a zettabyte or the amount of data connected to the internet.
In fact, a single cup of water contains 16 thousand zettabytes worth of hydrogen atoms. No one really knows how many bytes of data are machine-accessible in the world; no one can even make a very good guess. That’s okay, as that’s irrelevant to any coherent argument about the future, or about pretty much anything other than the future market for storage devices.
But it isn’t irrelevant to Gilder, who somehow sees a significance to his estimated one zettabyte of global storage and the interconnectedness of the human brain, which he also claims is on the order of one zettabyte. From that, he leaps to his conclusion — and here the lack of both logic and humility frustrate me — that the human brain is more efficient than the global internet, and that therefore artificial intelligence will never achieve the dreams of its proponents.
There are other odd bits thrown in as well: comments about machines being deterministic and so incapable of true learning (I think the jury is actually still out on whether or not the universe is deterministic.); the suggestion that blockchain and cryptocurrencies would somehow prevent investment bubbles and bad government policies; the fanciful idea that blockchain is immune to the security vulnerabilities of other computer architectures (It isn’t, as cryptocurrency thefts demonstrate.); and a bizarre nonchalance about the extraordinarily inefficient energy demands of blockchain and cryptocurrency compared to traditional architectures, even has he attempts to compare the computation efficiency of the human brain to the global electrical demands of the internet.
Finally, Gilder touches on what seems, to me, to be the only truly topical issue, given the title of his book: the vulnerability of Google to competition. In the book, Gilder’s descriptions of Google’s vulnerabilities seem more metaphysical than financial, strange comments about the company’s structure being antithetical to some kind of ultimate philosophy of data and its ownership. In the interview, he focuses on the real prospect of foreign competition — specifically, Chinese competition — to the search/advertising juggernaut. I think he’s right that Google is vulnerable: history teaches us that every business, however apparently entrenched and powerful, is vulnerable to competition. Gilder’s own examples of the dramatic shift, over the past decade, in the ranking of global enterprises, and of the ascendency of Apple, Microsoft, Google/Alphabet, and Amazon, should suggest that the one constant truly is change. We don’t need George Gilder to tell us that.
I can’t speak for Dave, but I thought I heard a hint of reserved skepticism in his tone. If so, I think it was well warranted. I have long enjoyed Gilder’s work, and I hope he recovers from his infatuation with “blockchain” and its vague and improbable promises, and returns to the more clear-headed futuristic vision that has typified most of his writing. Unfortunately, I did not find his performance in this interview encouraging.